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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26027680">Executions and Pardons</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted'>rabbit_hearted</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys &amp; Sophism (Webcomic)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>A LOT of Angst, F/M, I swear I will not make a habit of this, OKAY LISTEN, This was a sickness i needed to rid myself of, dark themes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:07:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,596</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26027680</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe this is why they’re drawn to each other. This lack of pretense, stripped clean and laid bare, a tableau of all of their worst intentions. When she lays down her ace and tilts her gaze to him, all wicked heat pulled directly from the earth’s core, he knows what it means without her having to say anything at all.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Belladona Davenport/Tim Sake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Executions and Pardons</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I want to set the expectation upfront that this is a darker sort of character study and contains themes that I neither glorify nor condone — Two people doing wretched things to themselves and each other. I hope that my intentions translate.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I. </p><p>She knows what he’s about to do, because they are the very same. Sirens lurking beneath the depths, magnets attracting collateral damage, sinners seeking atonement. Bathed in blood and baptised by fire. </p><p>“It’s a shame,” Bella says, shuffling a poker chip in her palm. “You always considered him a friend.” </p><p>She says this not because she’s sorry, but because she knows that it’s the cutting thing. She will always carve at him with the methodical precision of the fundamental truth, because she decided long ago that Tim Sake is a particularly intriguing puzzle, a creature she’d like to strip of his maw and his hyde. </p><p>He puffs his cigar, betraying nothing.  “It needs to be done.” </p><p>“He is an honest man, though,” she muses, leaning back on her elbow. Her free hand twists her blade underneath the table. “Don’t you feel a little-”</p><p>“Guilty?” He purrs, turning to her. “Come, now, Davenport. You and I both know the answer to that question.” </p><p>“Kevin Chow,” she murmurs. “What an unfortunate turn of fate, crossing paths with you.”</p><p>He glances at the man at the other end of the table, his spectacled face open and blithely unaware, splitting cards and decanters of whiskey with humanity’s dregs. He hopes that some sort of afterlife exists, not for Kevin’s sake but for his own. Tim understands, of course, that he deserves a penance of ash and bone. </p><p>“You don’t believe in fate.” He slides his chips toward the center of the table.</p><p>“All in?”</p><p>He hums. </p><p>“And that wife of his. Sweet, that one. Like a little lamb to slaughter.” </p><p>“Oh, please,” Tim spits. “Spare me.” </p><p>She reaches for Tim’s cigar and slides it between her lips, and he reacts the way he always will, like a shark to the scent of blood in the water. “You know I won’t.”</p><p>“You never do.” </p><p>Maybe this is why they’re drawn to each other. This lack of pretense, stripped clean and laid bare, a tableau of all of their worst intentions. When she lays down her ace and tilts her gaze to him, all wicked heat pulled directly from the earth’s core, he knows what it means without her having to say anything at all. </p><p>It’s how he ends up tangled up with her in a storage closet, one fist coiled in the fabric of her dress — red, like hot blood and whiplash — the other in her hair. She almost looks vulnerable, head tipped back, neck exposed to him like a strip of moonstruck earth. </p><p>“We’ve really got to stop doing this,” he says, and he sinks his teeth into her throat. They taste each other everywhere besides their mouths, a mechanical end to a means, a release fated in blood. </p><p>“You couldn’t if you <em> tried</em>,” she sneers, blowing hot breath into the crook of his shoulder. Her hand pulls at his belt, his at her waist, backing her up onto the edge of a shelf. When they finally meet in the middle, they know, innately, that the only way out is through mutually-assured destruction. </p><p>She nearly cries out and he clamps his hand over her mouth, shushing her with an exhale through his teeth. She nips down on his palm, hard enough to break skin. </p><p>“Anything you do,” Bella warns him, pupils blown wide with lust, “I can do so much worse.” </p><p>“Don’t I know it.” </p><p>They’re nearly silent, save for the rattling shelves and their stolen breaths, curses whispered to dead air. Back and forth in their fated waltz, meeting each other’s hardened glares head-on, a game of chicken that, suddenly, feels monumentally important. Hardly moving, as though avoiding complicitness in their own pleasure. Her hands curled around the gnarled wood, his at her throat.</p><p>When they finish, they stumble apart, pulling on their clothes in the stale dark. Outside, the poker game carries on in a muted lull. Every so often a boisterous guffaw will surface from beneath the crest of the wave, reminding them of the life that continues outside of themselves.</p><p>A strip of light underneath the door illuminates half of her face, sharp and severe, watching him with the clinical interest of a crime scene investigator. “Do you feel absolved,” she begins, “Knowing you won’t be the one twisting the knife?” </p><p>He turns to her, lips swollen in the places where they collided with his neck, tendrils of pink hair tangled in her earrings. “Of course not.” </p><p>She tilts her head, lips pursed in accusation. “Liar.” </p><p>“I know what I’ve done, leading him here.”</p><p>Bella threads her fingers through her hair, unraveling her earrings. “That may be so, <em> Timmy-</em>”</p><p>“I <em> told </em>you not to-”</p><p>“-but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ll be the one to kill him. Sure, you’ll frame the wife, but you don’t have Chow’s blood on your hands, at the end of the day.”</p><p>Tim shrugs. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” When he reaches over to pry a lock of her hair loose from her earring, her narrowed glare snaps up, mouth pooling with venom. </p><p>“Don’t touch me,” she snaps, swatting his hand away. </p><p>He rolls his eyes, tipping his palms up towards her. “You were just making it worse.” </p><p>“I don’t give a shit.”</p><p>Bella watches him as he pulls his tie on, making quiet, deft work of the knot. “Suit yourself.” </p><p>When he turns to the door, she’s in his blind spot, a deceptively soft blur of cream and coral, abstracted of all her teeth and edges. He can feel her, though, always close behind, lingering, the way the moon hangs in the sky even after daybreak. </p><p>“You’re afraid of me,” she says. </p><p>He smiles hollowly and twists open the door. Sickly yellow light spills in and falls onto his scar, puckered and angry, like scorched earth after a lightning strike.</p><p>“Obviously,” he says. “Every demon I’ve ever met has looked like you.” </p><p> </p><p>II.</p><p>It doesn’t take her long, because nothing does. If Belladonna Davenport were an object, she’d be a train without brakes. </p><p>The hilt of her knife descends like the crack of a gavel, though the nature of her conviction is impossible to discern. There are executions and pardons, though her hands have a habit of bending everything out of shape, blurring the lines until a kiss feels like a curse, a wound like a reprieve. </p><p>“I was handling this,” he says.</p><p>“Oh, is that what you call running your mouth?” Her lips are cut from glass, stained by merlot. She is a shimmering fever dream, a mirage born out of the sidewalk cracks of his worst nightmares, real until you remember that she isn’t. </p><p>Her heels click towards him until they stand toe to toe. </p><p>“<em>Tch,</em>” he spits. “Lovely seeing you, Davenport.” He tilts his chin so that he can appraise her with his good eye. “You act as though you haven’t even missed me. I’m wounded.” </p><p>“What I <em> miss,</em>” she hisses, raking her tongue across her lip, “Is you being out of the country.” </p><p>“Funny,” Tim purrs. “You weren’t so keen to get rid of me the last time I saw you.” </p><p>“Call it a lapse in judgement.” </p><p>“Three in one night, if we’re talking specifics.”</p><p>She looks so cruel. Cold and delicate, like crystallized breath. “Semantics.”</p><p>This is the way they will always be together, nature’s most sinister defect. Tragic and fated, like the way a mother bird instinctively knows to push the weakest fledgling out of the nest. Written into each other like fingerprints. </p><p>“Why didn’t you kill her?” </p><p>She glances at the mouth of the alleyway, at the shadowy, transient shapes beyond. “Too many witnesses.” </p><p>“Of course. I wouldn’t have thought…”</p><p>“What?” She grins wryly at him, a mean little quirk of her lips. “That I’d show <em> mercy</em>? Please.” Bella sneers down at the girl, red hair fanned around her face like a pool of blood. “This little brat steps out of line and it’ll be the last thing she ever does.” </p><p>“What are you doing here, anyway?” He asks, following her into the drifting foot traffic. She assimilates like a shadow, slinking through the crowd in competent, weightless strides. </p><p>“I was following you to make sure you didn’t get into trouble, but it looks like we can’t leave you on your own for two minutes.” She clicks her tongue. “The Purple Hyacinth may have beat me to the other four idiots, but don’t think I’d hesitate to finish you the moment you become an inconvenience.” </p><p>“You know,” he says, “Sometimes I wonder about you two.” Tim turns to her, incisors gleaming in the harsh daylight. “How long it must have taken for them to break you.” </p><p>“Him? They never did.” Bella scowls, tipping her face into the sunlight. “The Purple Hyacinth is weak,” she says, her words long and lazy, dipped in velvet. “They never were able to break that funny habit of his.”</p><p>“Habit?”</p><p>“<em>Feeling,</em>” she spits. “He’ll wind up dead with no one to thank but himself.” </p><p>“And you?” He asks. “Do you ever-”</p><p>It happens so quickly, like drifting into a daydream. Her hands close around his lapels, tight. She spins him into an alley and shoves him up against the brick wall so that his head snaps back, gaze fixed up to the forking skyline, splitting through the rooftops like a clawing hand.</p><p>“You sure do ask a lot of questions, <em> Timmy,</em>” she breathes, pushing her forearm into his windpipe. “Do I ever <em> what?</em> Feel? Regret?”</p><p>He draws in a gasping breath. His vision drifts in and out of focus, save for that cruel mouth, the nucleus of everything. </p><p>“I’m going to tell you something now,” she says, smelling of sweet smoke, like burnt sugar, “And you’d do well to listen very carefully.”</p><p>He grins, then, a lazy thing, like rose thorns snaking up a trellis. </p><p>“I have a particular way of dealing with prying little insects like you, a method which I suspect you’d find rather uncomfortable.” Tim coughs when she presses the edge of her bony wrist further in, scattering sparks across his periphery. “This will be the last time you ask me anything about myself, but because you’re a fun little plaything, I’ll humor you just this once.” </p><p>She leans in close, her breath hot and unforgiving, like a sunburn. “My only defect is my sex. That spineless Purple Hyacinth has weaseled his way into the leader’s palm solely because we’re living in a man’s world. I have never regretted anything I’ve done.” She releases him then, and he crumples to the ground like a house of cards, clawing fruitlessly at his jugular. “The worst part is when it’s over.”</p><p>Bella watches him with detached interest, scowling hollowly at his writhing figure, forehead bent flush against the pavement. His harried breaths ricochet through the alley in staccato white noise.</p><p>After a long moment, he lifts himself to his knees, chest heaving, clouded stare ablaze with loathing. When he beams at her, it’s humorless and feral, a negative imprint of a recognizable thing. </p><p>“Who’s the liar now?”</p><p> </p><p>III.</p><p>The first time he wants to kiss Belladonna Davenport, just to see what it’d be like, she has him backed between a door and a blade, ablaze in orange lamplight and cosmic fury. </p><p>“Know that when underdogs bark at me like that, the next thing you know, they’re squealing because their guts are all over the floor.” </p><p>The door to Tim’s right swishes shut, and then they’re alone in the courtyard with only the audience of the bleating cicadas as their witnesses. The air has grown syrupy between them, thick with humid breath and reckless desire. </p><p>“Why don’t you tell me what’s up with that cop, hm?”</p><p>She forgets that he worked in the mines. That he’s used to applying pressure to dirty, earthen things and making them into something magnificent. </p><p>“Jealous? Don’t worry. You know I’ll come to you when I need to fu-”</p><p>The tip of the blade presses into the hollow of his throat, just deep enough to nick the thin skin there. “You’re on thin ice,” she murmurs, soft and bated, the way of a predator before it strikes. </p><p>“She guessed my involvement in the Allendale bombing, but it didn’t matter.” Tim swallows and the edge of the blade follows slowly, tracking the path. “No one believed her.” He wets his lips, chuckling lowly. “She even got demoted.”</p><p>“Demoted? Why?”</p><p>“Crazy son of a bitch smashed my head against the mirror so hard it shattered.” </p><p>Bella huffs a laugh, her ochre gaze hooded with amusement. “You’re kidding me.” </p><p>“Serious as a heart attack,” Tim deadpans, assessing her wryly. Slowly, she returns her blade to its sheath, but she doesn’t relinquish her grip against his sternum. “Any other questions, Davenport?”</p><p>“Don’t challenge me, Sake. You know better than that.”</p><p>“You say that an awful lot,” he muses, “And yet, here I stand.”</p><p>He’s made his decision, then, watching her looking at him as though he’s something she’d like to excise, crueler than the dead of winter. He leans forward and crashes his mouth against hers in a killing blow, testing the clash of their breaths like a pet theory, like a fly to a web. At his deadly proximity, her stare is a kaleidoscope of furious, deceptive heat — in the way that you feel cold when you’re actually running a fever, in the way that very hot water sometimes feels frigid to the touch. </p><p>For a moment, neither of them move. Her eyes drift shut, and then explode open more, pupils blown wide before narrowing to pinpricks, sharpened like two iron sights. She bites down on his lip, splitting it in a rush of warm, liquid copper, and then slams him back into the door so hard that the world tips into softened focus before righting itself.</p><p>“What the <em> fuck,</em>” she breathes, lips parted in incredulity, “is wrong with you?” </p><p>He spits into the dirt and nudges it with the toe of his shoe. “Testing a theory I’ve had for a while.” </p><p>Tim might have expected her to hit him, then. To shake his shoulders, or scream, or stab him. But she does none of that, simply takes a wide step back, shoulders curled in as though braced for impact, eyes milky with the memory of something haunted.</p><p>“Are you-” </p><p>He takes a tentative step forward, memorizing this discordant expression intently, because he knows that she will never let him see her this way again. Bent inward like origami, head tipped down, the posture of prey. </p><p>“Get away from me,” she says, low and purposeful. </p><p>“Listen, I-”</p><p>She brings her palm to her hip, then, fingertips curled around the hilt of her blade, winking gold against the lamplight. “The only reason I’m not going to kill you,” Bella says slowly, “is because the Messenger would ask questions.” </p><p>He glances at the babbling koi pond, a blue vein splitting the barren land between them. “I-”</p><p>By the time he turns back to her, she is wiped clean. Spine ramrod straight, sharp lips curled into a sneer, chin tossed back and reflecting the light in burnt refractions. There’s nothing more that either of them haven’t said already. Here they stand, the sum of their parts, emaciated and bloodied. Stripped of all of their killing prowess, they face each other in a definitive draw that, somehow, feels like a loss for them both. She turns and leaves, those sharp heels clicking against the cobblestone, fading down the path like a waning crescent. </p><p>Thick, swarming, silence, and somehow, it’s the cruelest thing she’s ever said to him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>WHEW. Well, the fact that I am publishing this immediately after writing LuLa feels a bit like the duality of human nature.</p><p>I ... know that this was a lot. I just needed to excise it from my system before I set to work on the next chapter of Small Choice, honestly. This has been bouncing around in my brain for days and I needed to be CLEANSED.</p><p>Thoughts? Sending love to you, my wonderful reader.</p><p>-Rabbit</p></blockquote></div></div>
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